


The Armistice at the End of the World

by buckstiel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Enemies to Allies, Gen, Guilt, POV Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo, Post-Star Wars: Rebels, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 16:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16957422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: Stuck together on a far-flung planet, Thrawn and Ezra must learn to live with each other outside the trappings of the war.





	The Armistice at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for a rebels tribute zine a while ago (i like having all my stuff in one place) so nothing about the latest novel was taken into account. 
> 
> thank you feraldanvers for the beta :*

With the purrgils’ tentacles wrapped around his body, beginning their sharp tug into hyperspace, Grand Admiral Thrawn expected to die. He expected to die, and for once his clever brain failed him--there was no way out, not now, but at least he could have offered the rebels some barb of a remark. A line to record in the histories not yet written on the Galactic Empire. A signal to send back to Csilla so they would know he died with his honor intact.

His only thought didn’t even make it past the back of his tongue.

_Oh_.

The purrgils squeezed at his ribs and his view of Lothal smeared into nothing.

And he waited.

* * *

 

None of the various stories of the afterlife Thrawn had heard in his travels ever accounted for a mouthful of dirt and pebbles.

“So you survived, too, huh?”

Thrawn tried to push himself to his feet but barely a quarter of the way there, he buckled under the bruises and strains wailing up his muscles, collapsing back down to the ground. A humiliating display, but at least his face wasn’t collecting any more filth. “Evidently,” he said finally, forcing any bit of surprise from his voice. “Did you deduce that yourself, Bridger? I’m impressed.”

“Hilarious,” Bridger muttered.

“I would not call what I said a joke.”

Bridger rolled his eyes and left him where he sat. The boy didn’t appear much better off than Thrawn himself, the orange jacket he always wore ripped past the point of usefulness, one ankle thick and purpled, and that was only what he could spot at a glance. Bridger’s hobbling took him past the patch of rocky soil where Thrawn had landed into a gentle slope of grass that gave way to a sheer cliff and then--the sea, roiling and spraying vainly up at his feet.

The purrgils had dumped them on an island--and not even a large one, Thrawn observed against his straining neck muscles. “Where are we?”

Bridger turned, frowning. “You’re the smart one, apparently. Why don’t you figure it out?”

Thrawn’s mouth pressed into a thin line. In any other circumstance--

“You deserved that, by the way,” Bridger continued, staring back out over the sea.

“Did I.”

To that, Bridger said nothing, still keeping his eyes on the horizon, uselessly searching for any other hunk of rock rising up out of the watery mass of the planet, one to claim as his own. One with more space for vegetation, easier access to the sea for fishing, better chances for survival. He might not bring the lightsaber down on Thrawn’s throat himself, but there would be ample ways to put him on the path to the grave.

A few minutes passed in silence, and Bridger limped away from the cliff. The shredded orange jacket peeled off his skin, clinging to it out of habit, before he balled it up as a pillow and collapsed to the ground. “Nothing like some hyperspace travel to put you in the mood for a nap.” He flung an arm over his eyes and within minutes was snoring loud enough to drown out the waves.

He felt safe enough to sleep in his presence. The concept sent Thrawn’s brain grinding to a halt.

It had to be an elaborate plan, a long con braided into Bridger’s knowledge of the Force. The logic slipped from his fingers otherwise.

* * *

 

Four days into the sentence on their terrible island, Thrawn had run out of possible explanations for why the crew of the Ghost had not kicked Bridger out years ago.

The boy talked incessantly and about nothing that would warrant the energy, even when he could tell that Thrawn was quite pointedly not paying attention. In a day and a half, he learned more about Pellaeon’s favorite serial holodrama than he did the entire time he served aboard the Chimaera--it was the Lasat’s favorite holodrama too, as it turned out, and Bridger lamented time and time again about missing the season finale.

“That’s cliffhangers for you,” Bridger said. He’d caught a large fish earlier that evening and was roasting it--for the two of them--over a fire he set with his lightsaber. “But enough about me… tell me something about yourself.”

Thrawn squinted at him over the spit hanging onto the last of the fish. If he was digging for intelligence to help take him down, he was making a sloppy job of it.

“Look, we’re stuck here together and the only things I know about you are that you’re a jerk, mainly, and the only non-human I’ve ever encountered in the Empire.” He paused, raising his eyebrows slightly before tucking another chunk of fish in his mouth. “There’s a story there.”

“Could you please chew with your mouth closed.”

He couldn’t, apparently. “It’s not like I have anyone to tell, either.”

Thrawn swallowed the huff that had been creeping up the back of his throat and stared out to a point on the horizon past the glow of the fire, toward where the ocean would be if he could distinguish it from the sky in the dark. At night, the surface settled into a glassy calm, offering up a perfect mirror of the night sky and ruining his attempts at determining what system they might be in.

Tonight was no different: instead of the crashing waves, Thrawn was left with a popping fire and a noisy, disgusting child.

“I can guess, if that’s easier,” Bridger started again, pausing to lick grease from his fingers. “And you can tell me if I get close.”

The guessing, like the rest of his yammering, had no end in sight, even into the next day--not when Bridger tested a spring of knobby red berries along the cliffside, not when another fish snapped his rod in two, not when he needed to keep all his attention on resetting the wrap around his swollen ankle.

“Well, if you weren’t adopted--were you some new type of clone? Is the Empire getting into clones again?”

The pulsing at Thrawn’s temple leaned into a nasty throb, and he stood from the collection of reeds he was trying to fashion into a sleep mat. Bridger sat a few feet away and didn’t appear to notice Thrawn approaching until his figure blotted out the sun.

“Was I close, then?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Thrawn knelt down and slapped his hands away from the makeshift bandage. “If I had to watch you struggle with this any longer, I might have had a coronary.”

For the first time in days, the boy was silent; Thrawn didn’t glance up from the wrap to see if he was staring, but he almost didn’t need to. Something about the Force, he assumed, gave Bridger’s gaze physical weight where others’ merely dealt in metaphor.

“Thanks.” Bridger’s eyes followed him as he returned to his reeds.

“I did not do it for you.”

“I’m still thanking you.”

He bit his tongue, willing himself to ignore the remark completely as Bridger’s lopsided footsteps faded into the roar of the surf. Even with the footsteps gone, that same weight rested on his shoulders, too thick and pressing to shrug off, and he wouldn’t give Bridger the satisfaction of turning to look back.

* * *

 

Thrawn did not operate well without a plan--preferably one that stretched years into the future, but any would do. With one well-timed jump to hyperspace, the purrgils had shredded the plan central to the whole of his life, and their new island offered little on which to build a solid foundation. Soon, a few more weeks had passed, and he realized with a start the the bulk of his strategic energy had been directed not toward outsmarting whatever Bridger was planning, but making the roof of his new shelter as waterproof as possible.

Military tactics did not easily translate to engineering, but it was a puzzle to keep his mind occupied, and he could tell himself studying that set of ancient Kaminoan sculptures was helping.

It _had_ to help--because the weeks trapped there had no end in sight, and Bridger was somehow, beyond all odds, still guessing about Thrawn’s background.

( _“Did the Emperor find you frozen on an ice planet after a hundred thousand years?”_

_“You’re a human who slowly became all-cyborg and got the skin and eyes in an upgrade? Like a gank, maybe? No?”_

_“You’re the Emperor’s son, aren’t you? What’s your mom like, then? Who would marry the Emperor?”_ )

Bridger stood at the cliff nearest to where Thrawn was continuing work on his roof, the boy sucking at the back of his teeth as the lure bobbed in the water below and he concocted his latest explanation. The sound was close to burrowing itself into Thrawn’s brain when it suddenly stopped and Bridger cleared his throat.

“Did you…” He stopped, sighed. The fishing line flew up into his hand by the Force so he could lay the rod on the ground, really look at Thrawn and put all that expectation back on his shoulders. This time, he caught him right in the eye. “Did you join the Empire as a bid to save your people?”

Thrawn tossed the wording around in his head to find a weak spot, a technicality on which to base a denial, but even the extra split second he took was enough for Bridger’s eyebrows to shoot halfway up his forehead.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“I neither confirmed nor denied anything you said.”

“So you did!”

“You’re making assumptions,” Thrawn said, clipped. “And whether or not I did, it would be no business of yours. The nature of the Empire’s relationship with the Ascendency--”

“How’s it working out for you?” For the first time since they arrived on the island, Bridger addressed him as a Jedi, a shadow of whom he could become stretching into the future. “Have they helped you at all? Do you even believe in what the Empire stands for, or was it just a means to an end?”

The reeds in Thrawn’s hand had snapped under the pressure of his fists, his knuckles pulled taught, white-blue. “I said…” His voice dropped low and dangerous, beneath the noise of the ocean, but he knew Bridger could still hear him. “You’re making assumptions.”

They didn’t speak for the rest of the day, the air thick and ready to spark.

* * *

 

In the unfinished hut, the sea silent beneath the cliffs, Thrawn dreamt of Eli.

This wasn’t the first time. The number of people Thrawn had trusted in his life was few, and the number he’d ever considered friends even fewer. Singular. It was logical that every so often Eli’s image would sidle in among the more shapeless parts of his dreams, so he didn’t dwell on it. Until now, he hadn’t had the time to.

His dress greys were freshly ironed and blended into the dark hues of Admiral Ar’alani’s command bridge, a modern take on the kind Thrawn spent his adolescence studying. With every subtle move Eli made, the empty space echoed, reverberating to the duraglass and outward into the emptiness of Wild Space.

“Finally got word of your sieges on Atollon and Lothal,” Eli said suddenly. “Not from you, of course.” He turned, looking at Thrawn but also past him in a way he couldn’t remember from their years spent side-by-side. “You didn’t used to be so cruel.”

“I have always been pragmatic.” The voice was his own, the Chiss accent clear, but he couldn’t sense the vibrations of it in his chest. Himself but not himself, familiar yet foreign, and Eli’s eyes still raked him over while staying two good steps away from turning that neutral look into a glare. “Pragmatism is sometimes ugly. You should know by now why I act the way I--”

“Not like this,” Eli murmured. “Not like this.”

In the background, beeping shrilly on the monitors, an alert runs across the displays--something about Dantooine and a moon of Yavin--and Eli’s hand pressed back against Thrawn’s chest. It pushed until he stumbled, jarring awake with rocks shoving bruises into his cheekbone where he’d tossed and turned in the night.

It had been so long.

He wondered if Eli still spoke like he had, the backwoods of Lysatra dripping over every vowel, or if the constant thrum of Cheunh in his ears had molded them into something new.

“Everything all right in there?”

The harsh drag of Lothalian Basic was even rougher disrupting his thoughts of home without the white noise of the sea to smooth it over. Bridger stood at the entrance to his shelter, crouched low enough to peek his head below the frame of the entrance.

“You were talking in your sleep, which you haven’t done before, so--”

“I am fine.” Thrawn sat up and ran a hand through his hair, trying not to wince when his fingers caught in a snarl or stray piece of grass. “I am not sure why this concerns you.”

“We concern each other as long as we’re both stuck here,” he said with a tone that implied _sorry to break it to you_.

Bridger stared at him like Eli never would have dared--impatience had a heavy presence across his entire face, tempered with what could have been disbelief but also a begrudging near-fondness. Nowhere to be found was an ounce of respect.

Thrawn took in the sight for what felt like a hundred standard years before motioning beside him. “You can sit down if you’d like.” He waited for Bridger to settle and for his own skin to stop itching with the close proximity. Some part of him still considered Bridger an enemy to be outsmarted; the logical part was beginning to doubt if the boy had any larger plan at all.

“Did the Empire ever actually help the--um, what’s your species name?”

“Chiss,” Thrawn said. “And--”

Again he thought of Eli and whether the Emperor would have made the delegation to the Ascendancy had Thrawn not voiced the idea himself. He thought of the untouched messages waiting in his private inbox aboard the _Chimaera_ , of the inner Imperial politics that suddenly evoked no more than a vague apathy.

“No,” Thrawn said finally. “I… it was supposed to be an investment. For something yet to come.”

The weight of Bridger’s gaze was suffocating, but not as suffocating as the silence accompanying it.

“It’s far easier than I imagined to lose sight of things and… miss where you cross a line.” Thrawn swallowed a sigh and then a jump when Bridger put a hand on his shoulder. “Please do not touch me.”

“Sorry.” Bridger pulled his hand back to his chest. “I thought we might’ve been at that point.”

“Not at all.”

“Fair enough.”

The silence returned, but this quiet let him breathe, let him peer out of his shelter to the bare expanse of the island beyond: the terse wind nudging at the grasses, the occasional plop of a fish breaking the surface of the water below. They would get off this planet--eventually, not soon, and the lives they left behind would not be waiting. _Eventually_ had enough time to work between his hands, softened and stretched into a new directive for when the blur of hyperspace sat beyond duraglass instead of a stray purrgil tentacle.

The spiderweb of events unspooled behind his eyes, the first thread of possibility already highlighted, marked to watch-- _The war is over when we return._

_And the Rebels win._


End file.
